@fatedfox @renbymon @darac Ah, fun stuff! The dial up ip masquerading sad one of my first projects, too!

@dh @renbymon @darac I had one of the few 56k flex winmodems with basic Linux support (yay lucent chipsets!) We managed to get basic DoD working (in the time before surftime). It was quite the thing!

@fatedfox @renbymon @darac Impressive! I was still using a 28.8k back then, and never did DoD. The single most difficult but if I Internet connectivity hardware I've used, though, was definitely a Connexant AccessRunner PCI ADSL card. Not only did that involve learning ATM and updating a driver multiple times, but also dealing with a pretty poor card in terms of hardware. It still did okay for a good few years though!

@dh @renbymon @darac I think Lucent became part of Conexant funnily enough. That 56k modem was one of the best I ever used, but it sounded like you had a real fight with yours!

@fatedfox @renbymon @darac I know Alcatel and Lucent all seemed to become one at some point, I wouldn't be surprised in Conexant were pulled in/pulled them in too.

I think we'd just got rid of the AccessRunner before you came over. It was an… interesting thing. ADSL was theoretically supported up to 2Mb/s downstream, but in practice you'd never get anything over around 600kb/s because of the really poor PCB layout and dodgy clocking, so we had to swap out to an external modem when >512kB/s because an option for us.

@dh @renbymon @darac A lot of Alcatel / Lucent IP was used in the early days of xDSL. I found an article about it from 1999 :) I'm reasonably certain when we met, you were using external CPE *nods* https://www.eetimes.com/conexant-pairs-with-lucent-to-speed-deployment-of-sdsl-connections/

@fatedfox @renbymon @dh I got #MyFirstLinux on a magazine cover. Mandrake Linux sounded good because it was optimized for Pentiums! Then I found the pain of installing RPMs before yum was a thing, and switched to #Debian.

@darac @fatedfox @dh Trouble with RPMs was the entire reason that I wanted to try something that wasn't RPM based. ^^

@renbymon @darac @dh I don't recall ever having a problem with rpm, or the early days of dpkg when Leonerd introduced me to Debian :) Debian did win out for me in the end, it was just more organically intuitive to me, and remains so! (Although my linux interactions now are fairly limited - Y'all run rings around me!)

@fatedfox @renbymon @dh It was dependency management that did it for me. As I recall, installing a package consisted of downloading it, then telling rpm to install it and then being told what packages that required, so you'd download those and try again. And again. And again.

Dpkg, on the other hand, seems to have always been paired with dselect or apt to do the legwork for you.

@LightTheUnicorn @renbymon @darac i think Ubuntu did a lot to make things familiar to people, but without making everything completely proprietary. I can see why a lot of people like it.

@dh @renbymon @darac I did move on to other distros over the years though and fell out of love with the direction it took. Running Arch these days, but it was absolutely my proper start in Linux.

@pippin @renbymon @darac That's quite an impressive CV!

@pippin @renbymon @darac Well, it really is a small world. I'm pretty sure I've got some of his stuff around on disks somewhere.